<p>If US News would just rank Berkeley higher, it could avoid a lot of this criticism.</p>
<p>Every now and then we have postings on CC talking about how the rankings make no sense and that we should not have them. Very soon after that discussion has ended, there will be another set of rankings from a different organization and there will be an animated discussion on those rankings on CC.</p>
<p>The fundamental issue here is that as a culture we want to separate the wheat from the chaff. We want to determine the winners and the losers and the rankings are supposed to do that. They are not couched as winners and losers but as trying to provide a basis of comparison of excellence, whatever that means. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl says
*anyone who thinks that there are meaningful differences between, say, #5 and #15 is an idiot anyway. *</p>
<p>I agree with you but unfortunately there are many people who think there is a difference between #5 and #6.</p>
<p>It has to be remembered that rankings are geared to certain audience and as long as that audience laps it up, rating organizations will continue to throw out ratings. US News is no exception, they make a lot of money selling the ratings.</p>
<p>On the filp side, there are rating organizations that are trying to portray the issues in a different light. Rating by the Chinese organization is clearly an attempt to portray Asian universities more favorably than UNSW by using different criteria as is the UK ratings. There is nothing right or wrong about this, it just shows the flaws in the rating system.</p>
<p>So the bottom line is that as long as there are people who want ratings, there will be people to provide ratings, however flawed. The old principal of Caveat Emptor or buyer beware applies to ratings also.</p>
<p>What the rankings are mainly good for:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/979553-how-did-you-do-your-first-cut-colleges.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/979553-how-did-you-do-your-first-cut-colleges.html</a></p>
<p>Its (of course) not the way to make your final choice. Its not a good way to compare two particular schools, esp schools close to each other in the rankings. It can be problematic being used to compare two very different kinds of schools (a general univ vs a tech school, for ex) </p>
<p>Where it IS useful, is getting a broad fix on a school you have never heard of, in relation to the thousands of institutions of higher ed. For those without a narrow geographic range, or a narrow choice due to the particular progam a student is interested, it can be helpful (though other ways of narrowing the choice can include "was it included in Fisk? etc - the criteria for such inclusion never create the same controversy as USNWR, presumably because USNWR ranks ALL the schools, and more folks get upset about, say the ranking Dartmouth vs Notre Dame, than whether school number 400 made the cut to get into Fisk)</p>
<p>This is amazing! This thread has more intensity that a sports thread on the BCS football rankings! We need a bowl game to settle it.</p>
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<p>I am not quite that blessed yet. I have a list of about 30 colleges for my D that needs to be slimed down. With all the info. I forgot how I got the information. I know it wasn’t from USNEWS.</p>
<p>Haha, Hunt for the win in post 21</p>
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<p>US News is quite clear in how it presents the ratings. They don’t try to “instill in our minds that there is a top 3.” No one, least of all US News, prevents anyone from extracting what they need out of the data set. US News doesn’t say “and see? You should all want to strive for HYP.” In fact, their editions always explicitly include “tales of lesser known schools.”</p>
<p>As for the presence of people who think there is a diff between #5 and #6. So? Let them think that way. They’re the ones who come across looking like fools (or sounding like fools, if they are on CC). How does it affect you in the slightest?</p>
<p>in fact USNWR present not only an ordinal list, but a cardinal score as well.</p>
<p>IE #18 could have a score of 70 and #19 a score of 69, OR #18 could have a score of 70 and #19 could have a score of only 65. So in theory, assuming you find their criteria and weights meaningful in the first place, you could see how close or how far apart two schools adjacent in the rankings are.</p>
<p>However I think I have NEVER seen anyone refer to the cardinal scores - ONLY to the rankings. I don’t know if its obsession with rankings, or simply innumeracy that drives that.</p>
<p>You can use the information in the columns in the US News tables without really paying attention to the rankings.
They report how they do their rankings, so you can evaluate whether what they think is important is similar to what you think is important.
I think they serve a useful purpose.</p>
<p>Since it is award season, I like to equate the school rankings to Oscar nominations. If a movie is nominated (i.e. school is in the top 20) then it might cause me to check it out. Is the winner of best picture the BEST movie of the year, maybe to some, but mostly likely not always for me. I mean, how do you compare Ghandi to E.T.? It just doesn’t happen. (still not over that loss!)</p>
<p>Anyone who uses the list as more than a place to start (as others have mentioned) is ill-informed or, as PG said, an idiot.</p>
<p>you just cant remove the rankings. They have to be there.
I agree that the USNR is a bit Ivy biased and anti public but that is what the world sees. You cant change it.
That is the reason why people die for Ivys.</p>
<p>Sure, I believe that the US News rankings have value. I don’t believe that they’re perfect or that its the sole authority on the relative assessment of college excellence, but I do believe that certain colleges are clearly more excellent than others, so assessing that difference is a very valid enterprise. I also believe that more excellent colleges and universities distinguish themselves from average schools by attracting better students, retaining and graduating those students at higher rates, and having smaller classes and faculty-to-student ratios, so that data is useful to me. </p>
<p>I find small differences between the rankings of different schools or rankings of the same school in different years to be relatively meaningless, so I tend to be fairly understanding toward US News’ need to tweak the criteria from year to year so that they aren’t publishing an identical list each year. That’s what they need to do to sell magazines. Does their subjective tweaking render the whole process of rating colleges invalid? No - you’ve got to realize that everything you read has been subjectively doctored to increase its reader appeal. That NY Times account of the press conference that you recently read - was it totally objective and factual? Of course not - a verbatim transcript of the press conference would have been totally objective, but you’d have no interest in reading that. The Times writer attributed a weight to different topics and comments, then assembled his or her account of the press conference in order to create a story line of his or her own design that might make you more inclined to read it. US News provides useful data and then, similarly, crafts it into a storyline. So use it in whatever way you find value, and “caveat emptor.”</p>
<p>I could be mistaken on this; Don’t you have to have an account with the USNews to assess their data other than rankings? I vaguely remember the rankings were public but not the data. If true, their data is harder to get to than their rankings.</p>
<p>^^^ They’re in business to sell magazines (and more recently, “Premium Online Editions” of their website). So yes, you get more if you pay more.</p>
<p>The online version used to give much easier access to the subsets of data that make up the ranking - so you could ignore things like “peer review” and concentrate on whatever mattered to you - graduation rate for example. I don’t think it’s as easy to get to the spread sheet mode anymore - unless they’ve made a wise change back to a useful format while I wasn’t looking…</p>
<p>^^So USNews is a ranking and data site if you are a fee paying member. For general public, it is a ranking organization since that’s the only thing they get to see. Would that be a fair assessment?</p>
<p>Once more with feeling, you don’t have to treat their rankings as anything but general guidelines any more than you have to treat movie reviews or Consumer Reports as indicative of what you should or must do.</p>
<p>I think it’s pretty funny that anybody would suggest that the reason people are eager to get into Ivy League schools is because they’re highly rated by US News. Mission accomplished, US News!</p>
<p>Thank goodness there is a US News Ranking or none of us would know that the Ivy League schools are any good. We would all be mistakenly trying to live vicariously through our University of Phoenix and Devry kids.</p>
<p>Interesting bit of hypocrisy: Boston University is, I believe, the only “National University” that has refused to submit the data directly to USNews. Also, BU President Brown has indicated his disdain for the rankings. But, in a recent mailing to alumni seeking contributions, BU cites the alumni giving percentage as a crucial element in the university rankings and urged alumni to contribute. (BU has a meager 8% alumni giving rate.)</p>
<p>Hunt & glido enjoyed your posts. funny</p>